Starting the Greenhouses

Hogwarts got its greenhouses added in Chamber of Secrets. They sat undisturbed in what was formerly an open courtyard until Deathly Hallows Part 2, at which point some adjacent architecture was removed and the greenhouses expanded a bit to fill the empty space.

My own 3D recreations of these greenhouses provided some fun challenges right off the bat. As I alluded to in the previous post, I was surprised to realize that they are not all identical. I mean, I knew that there was a lean-to attached to the wall of the castle as well as a domed conservatory out front, but I’d assumed the other greenhouses were octuplets. No such luck. The ones that run parallel to the Long Gallery aren’t quite as long as the ones that run east-west along the north facade, though they’re made of the same basic building blocks.

As always, I wanted to get the details and dimensions right. Without much in the way of detailed technical drawings, I resorted to making some quick-‘n’-messy diagrams to organize my thoughts and measurements.

Quick and messy, like I said, but it really helped me figure out how to proceed with the modeling. I started framing just one wall of just one greenhouse, laying out the largest support posts every 10 feet. Some of these will eventually have sculpted dragons on top, but those’ll come in a future blog post:

Blender’s Array modifier makes it easy to just work on one segment and have all the others update accordingly. No textures at this point either – I knew the white paint would later need to be scuffed up a bit.

Adding more details, temporarily pretending that the greenhouses don’t have any doors:

The familiar question of whether to follow the miniature or the set cropped up yet again. Actually, it’s more complicated. The greenhouses didn’t show up often in the films, but they got a glorious establishing shot in Chamber of Secrets. The VFX team put together a very impressive shot that moves across the lake, over the grounds, and right through an open window into the lean-to, AKA Greenhouse Three. The shot combines the 1/24th-scale Hogwarts miniature (and CG background) with a live-action plate shot on the greenhouse set, and it’s pretty seamless, especially for the early 2000s. But the camera has to go right up to the greenhouses, exposing a lot of detail…and at 1/24th scale, some of that detail wasn’t going to hold up. So they built separate 1/8th-scale miniatures of the three greenhouses the camera would get closest to. For whatever reason, while those larger bespoke miniatures match the design of the set, the main castle miniature is slightly different. I’m mainly talking about the windowpanes – they’re narrower and more numerous in the main castle miniature.

Sooooo…what to do? Follow the set and 1/8th-scale miniature, or follow the 1/24th-scale miniature? I take these decisions on a case-by-case basis, and for the greenhouses, I ultimately went with the wider windowpanes from the set and 1/8th-scale miniature (for a variety of reasons).

Here we go – doors and details and preliminary materials.

Starting to add the beams for the roof:

Hey, it looks kinda like a greenhouse!

By this point, I had been really debating exactly how much interior detail to do. This project file just keeps getting bigger and bigger, which means my computer has an increasingly hard time keeping up. It’s thus in my best interest to only include the details I need – but of course, the greenhouses are rather transparent, and I still wanted to them to “read” correctly from the outside. Once I had them fully enclosed, I was able to see how the materials interacted with the light and decide how much interior detail I needed to include. Not much, it turns out, as long as I don’t let the glass get too crystal-clear:

Some of the geometry got slightly messy as I went around the corners of the greenhouse, trying to respect all the various reference images as much as possible, but I’m pretty happy with the result:

For a moment, I thought all I had left to do was sculpt the decorative dragons on top, but then I remembered that I needed to pop the roof hatches too – otherwise, how would the camera float in for that great shot in COS?

(These are all open at random angles, BTW…I’m anal, but not anal enough to match them exactly.)

Anyway, I’ll be sculpting the dragons next, but we’ll save that for a future post, hopefully in video form. I’ll also need to create all the other greenhouses using the same components. See you next time!